In this episode Simon invites special guest Leslie Brissett to share his personal experience of race and identity.    

This delightful and deeply human conversation meanders through race and identity exploring otherness and drawing on psychoanalytic insights. Leslie shares his reflections and insights on these big issues bringing his unique perspectives on what it means to live a good life and create the good society.  

Leslie is from the UK with a Caribbean heritage, and recently relocated to live in Arkansas USA. Leslie is Director of Group Relations at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and has studied human dynamics in experiential settings in many countries; he is also the Company Secretary at TIHR.  Enjoy Listening!  

Our special guest today is Irena Izotova from Moscow, who will be sharing her thoughts and experience from a Russian perspective. Our conversation meanders through our experiences of the pandemic and we touch on how the 'Discourse of the Master' returns to impose prohibitions on us during the lockdown.

 This is something new to many in the west, but Irena points to this being historically familiar to Russians.   Irena relates how her elderly relative trangresses this prohibition as a refusal to submit once again to the prohibitions she experienced in her earlier life.  She also identifies the importance of arranging reflexive spaces both for leaders and for professionals who support them,  to keep their resilience and capacity to think and act maturely. We end the conversation by exploring how to live rather than survive, and how 'not to give up on our desire'.  

Irena is an Executive &Team Coach and Organizational Consultant oriented by a psychodynamic approach.  She is President of Association of Psychoanalytic Coaching and Business Consulting, an Analytic-Network Registered Coach, Lecturer at HSE and a Lacanian psychoanalyst.   Enjoy this podcast! 

In episode 4, Simon converses with special guest and internationally renowned Professor  Ajeet N. Mathur from Ahmedabad India.  Ajeet is a fountain of knowledge and wisdom, and their conversation traverses a range of issues in relation to these disruptive times.  In search of how to live a good life and create the good society, Ajeet highlights dignity and the loss of humanity as central concerns.  They observe how the return of the repressed is taking place referencing racism and colonialism playing out in different ways pending on the context and country. 

Ajeet N. Mathur PhD, is a Professor at IIM Ahmedabad with many years of consulting experience for transformative leadership and organisational change with businesses, governments, international institutions and not-for-profit organisations. He is an affiliate life member of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society, and Yoga Shikshak and Karma Sannyasin of the Bihar School of Yoga. Ajeet has been the EU-Tempus Professor of European Integration and Internationalisation and teaches courses in strategy, international business, action research methodologies, mysteries in management, directs group relations conferences.  His publications include 29 books and over 160 papers in scientific journals.

This episode Pandemic Psychodynamics UK opens up a wide-ranging and deeply engaging conversation with award winning author Steven D' Souza.  

We reflect on how people react to the anxiety produced when we get to a place of not-knowing.   We explore how Covid-19 amplifies previous social-political trends such as the rise in authoritarianism and conformism.  Also how the critical and creative thinking that is so urgently needed can be unconsciously repressed in pandemic time.   People can be silenced if they question the dominant discourse such as 'we follow the science' or the workplace equivalent this is 'evidenced-based', people often act as if these are neutral and apolitical,  yet power always plays out in how science, knowledge and data are used.  We end by focusing on social cohesion, and how pandemic time also increases community, how people are deeply touched.. when touching is physically prohibited.    

Steven D'Souza is author/co-author of four books. Most recently Not Knowing, with Diana Renner, which won the UK Management Book of the Year, and Not Doing. He has been an Associate Fellow at Said Business School, the University of Oxford, and currently heads Executive Development for a global organisation.  Enjoy! 

Simon is joined by Brigid Nossal to discuss pandemic psychodynamics in Australia

Brigid Nossal is a co-founder and co-Director of the National Institute of Organisation Dynamics Australia that delivers a fabulous Masters of Leadership and Management taking a psychodynamic-systems approach.  Brigid combines academic teaching and research with organisational consulting. She recently served on the Board of ISPSO, and is a Registered Analytic-Network Coach.  In this podcast Brigid insightfully reflects on the unconscious impacts the pandemic is having on the Australian psyche.  The discussion with Simon reflects emergent psycho-social influences on leadership and citizenship and they discuss the tightrope between localism and globalisation, nationalism and progressive opportunities. Enjoy! 

Simon is joined by Professor Zachary Green to discuss pandemic psychodynamics in the USA.  Zachary is Professor in Leadership Studies at University of San Diego, co-founder and director of Group Relations International. Zachary has three decades of experience studying, coaching and consulting to unconscious and systemic dynamics of global organizations, most notably through the World Bank.  Zachary discusses how projections and splitting are creating a secondary wave of challenges for the US that are particularly influenced by political polarization and exacerbated by culture wars. The pandemic is also exposing pronounced racial divides in health and welfare provision like never before. Simon and Zachary reflect on these gaps, and how psychoanalysis teaches us that lack creates desire….  could Covid-19 provoke a new push for greater social cohesion?  Faith, psychoanalysis and leadership are in the mix, enjoy this podcast!

Welcome to Edgy Ideas, where we explore what it means to live a ‘good life’ and build the ‘good society’ in our disruptive age.  

This podcast explores our human dynamics in today's networked society.   Addressing topical themes, we explore how social change, technology and environmental issues impact on how we live, and who we are - personally and collectively. Edgy Ideas podcast aims to re-insert the human spirit, good faith, ethics and beauty back into the picture, offering new perspectives and psycho-social insights.  We pay particular attention to how the ‘unconscious that speaks through us’ entrapping us in repetitive patterns and shaping our desires.  Each podcast concludes by contemplating what it means to live a ‘good life’ and create the ‘good society’.  Enjoy! 

Series 1 Pandemic Psychodynamics  

Simon will talk to guests from around the world exploring how conscious and unconscious dynamics are playing out in times of trauma

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